cover - next

FUTUREPROOFING: NEXT (F:N) - THE PROMISE We are on a mission to get organizations unstuck. Today’s companies are way too anchored to previous successes and to how things have always been done. Futureproofing ; NextTM declares a provocative new path to delivering change & impact in a rapidly evolving society, marketplace and techno-sphere. To get there, leaders need to work in a much bigger change sweet spot.

Our Futureproofing : Next guarantee — read and apply this book and you’ll deliver:

BETTER FUTURESReal benefits

BIGGER FUTURES

BOLDER FUTURES SIMPLER FUTURES

Real learnings

Real outcomes Real value

Outdeliver Outgrow

OutperformOutthink

AmbitionBreakthrough

What matters Sustainability

Clearer

FasterLeaner

Aligned

Explore our vision, mission and values further : futureproofingnext.com/vision

http://futureproofingnext.com/vision

what’s inside - A COMPASS FOR WHAT WORKS Futureproofing : NextTM is not just another innovation book (there are 60,000 of them already!). We set about to construct a different type of argument on how organizations from one hundred-to-five million people can change, grow and win. For these organizations, we didn’t want to explain phenomena, we wanted to actually help.

Our book identifies what the best companies are doing in real marketplace settings in addition to where the most future-savvy firms are pivoting to next. We’ve reflected these learnings back in our book with case studies, profiles, research and a suite of best practices, all under one umbrella.

Futureproofing : Next is not wishful thinking, or academic query, but instead evidence-based insight combined with smart future foresight.

Our proof?: - we have codified a change process & tools

used by 13,000 teams around the world - we have studied the leading practices of over

250 global best companies - we have supported our approach with the

results of 25 foresight studies

= Status

Quo

Innovation

Theatre

Imitate the Startup

Find What Works

Boundless Ideas

A shift is afoot. Our Futureproofing : Next (F:N) book, and collection of supporting assets & activities, function as a

future compass. Part manifesto, part field guide, part playbook and part resource bank, F:N is a movement &

curation for the 2020s on how leaders and change agents spearhead change, growth & innovation with 4 pillars:

PAINTING A FUTURE BEYOND INNOVATION We bridge corporate innovation, scaleup and edge

organizations’ biggest current transformation barriers & help solve their massively intriguing future challenges.

A PRACTITIONER’S PLAYBOOK FOR CHANGE Designed for the demands & realities of change agents, leaders and innovators that actually need to get to next.

A CREDIBLE FIELD GUIDE & SUCCESS ROADMAP Corporate-proofed and road-tested, our “See, Learn,

Decide, Commit” process is the innovation++ operating system for the modern change leader.

INNOVATION++ YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK Ideas & theoretical models are nice, but companies need to see tangible impact and results from their innovation++ investments. We offer confidence, competence & hope to

get them to a better, bigger, bolder & simpler future.

3

< < < <

I Think!? I KNOW … THERE’S A DIFFERENCE.

CONFIDENCE & COMPETENCE FOR YOUR FUTURE.

THE FUTURE BEYOND INNOVATIONDiscover the F:N difference:

http://futureproofingnext.com/innovationyoucantaketothebank

nhttp://futureproofingnext.com/innovationyoucantaketothebank/

FOREWORD WE’RE COMMITTED TO FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT. CORPORATE GROWTH WILL BE DRIVEN BY LEADERS WITH ONE FOOT FIRMLY IN THE FUTURE, ONE

EAR TO THE GROUND, AND ONE FINGER ON THE PULSE OF THE MARKET.

5

Rational optimists. Those are the kind of leaders we’re trying to support and create. People who have the imagination to envision change and the capacity to connect the dots from today’s early signals to novel lines of future business, causes, policies or plans.

The best companies are in a state of perpetual refresh. These are the types of organizations we’re committed to fuel. Equipping teams with a 360-degree view of today and an enlightened set of frameworks that help them learn fast, experiment well, and take their innovative concepts all the way to the bank.

Futureproofing : Next is a guide. Informed by thousands of corporate teams that have struggled with the puzzles of strategic innovation, transformation & change and mastered business growth at corporate scale. It’s designed to shift thinking and provide structure to the pursuit of what to do next.

HOW WE MET — we shared the stage in 2012 to launch our books: Wikibrands by Sean and Find Your Next by Andrea. At the time, corporate business agendas were still driven primarily by strategic models (e.g. The Toyota Way, Six Sigma, Porter’s Five Forces). There was a lot of focus on execution, benchmarking, and predictive models. It was assumed that large companies would lead the way as technologies evolved and markets changed. Foiling their plans, startups and unicorns were exploding on the radar, inspired by Alexander Osterwalder’s book, Business Model Generation & Eric Ries’ book Lean Startup.

THE 2010s — The application of innovation to traditional strategy was just emerging as an urgent need. Business leaders had just started to pick new points of departure to address The innovator’s Dilemma (Christensen, 1997). Open Innovation (Chesbrough 2003) and design thinking Change by Design (Brown & Katz, 2009).. People were just beginning to grasp the impact of accelerating advances in invention foreshadowed by Ray Kurzweil’s writings on singularity and insights into exponential technological progress.

R

SINCE THEN we’ve worked with companies on virtually every continent and conducted global research every year to understand what is keeping companies from translating trends and technologies into sustainable business impact. In 2019, we banded together to build a community of practitioners to inform our insights about bumps in the road, impossibilities, and lights at the end of the corporate strategy tunnel.

THE URGENCY TODAY — We recognize that leaders have improved their ability to generate creative ideas and have learned how to spin new ideas into “lean” initiatives. However, people are not prepared either to bring early stage concepts to scale, or to commit with confidence to bold new directions. They believe change is coming at us too fast and WANT to respond, but feel overwhelmed, lost, or ill-prepared to know how. A global pandemic may have loosened some constraints, but not the barriers to reimagination.

Every year, the aspiration-to-reality gap widens between what leaders know is important and how successfully they feel they’re able to act on new technologies, collaborations, expansions & business models.. That’s why we wrote Futureproofing : Next — to clear up the confusion about change & innovation and provide some battle-tested guidance to move beyond the baby steps. To deliver the future beyond innovation. With confidence and competence.

We hope you enjoy our book and supporting online resources, and consider the array of F:N opportunities to participate beyond this book.

Hope to see you in the future,

Andrea Kates & Sean Moffitt, Co=authors, Futureproofing : Next

TIMES CHANGE, SO SHOULD YOUR THINKING… Our book shares a healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo, In practice, well under a quarter of change, innovation, transformation and non-organic growth efforts succeed. Incalculable wasted time, resource, credibility & energy are the results. Schools & tools in vogue for the last 70+ years are being used for our now smarter, connected age — despite some of their merits, none of them were designed to tackle end-to-end corporate change,

SWOTAnalysis Late 1960s

Five Forces Late 1970s

Benchmarking Late 1980s

Six Sigma Early1980s

Stage Gate/ Waterfall

Early 1960s

Design Thinking Late 1990s

Lean Start Up Early 2010s

Blue Ocean Late 2000s

Blitzscaling Late 2010s

Agile Early 2000s

Futurists/ Long Range Planning

Early 1950s

Business Model Generation Mid 2010s

FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT THE 2020s

Scrutinize the benefits & drawbacks of the most popular 20 previous schools of innovation:

futureproofingnext.com/schoolsofinnovation

http://futureproofingnext.com/schoolsofinnovation

The Future Beyond

InnovationThe Change World

Has ChangedA Changemakers'’

New Lexicon F:N - A New Point

of Departure

A #Next30 Curation

Corporate Innovation is the Major Leagues

It was perhaps overly-ambitious to expect innovation to fulfill all of the expectations placed on it. However, it was also understandable that corporate leaders would look to innovation as the panacea to address slowing growth over the last two decades.

Most companies have been looking for change in a bottle - using this quixotic word “innovation” to combat a sense of powerlessness in the face of an accelerating market, cross-industry threats sweeping technologies & new business models developed by nimble startups.

We’ve worked with leaders & teams for years to figure out what’s been missing and concluded it’s time for an innovation overhaul.

That’s a key premise of Futureproofing : Next — to eliminate the chaos of a point-solution approach to innovation, where we’re playing whack-a-mole with disparate parts of the puzzle.

We’ve created a more holistic innovation roadmap, that cherry picks the future-ready practices that have proven to work best, removes the fluff, and gives leaders a

starting point to bring successful new products, services, expansions, experiences, business models & ecosystems across the finish line.

FUTUREPROOFING ELEMENTS: THE BEST TECHNIQUES TO FUEL CORPORATE GROWTH. Taking the best and reducing the handicaps of: strategic foresight, ideation, open innovation, design thinking, lean development, agile process, culture, scale & commercialization practices (#Next30 — see pp 10-11).

AN INTEGRATED PROCESS TO SMOOTH OUT THE CHAOS. A system for nurturing initiatives at the team level + a framework for decision making as a company at scale (See, Learn, Decide, Commit — Chapter .2).

A BALANCE BETWEEN HIGH AMBITION WITH HONEST EXPECTATIONS. The right blend between understanding future potential and having the confidence and pragmatism to act today —a “goldilocks” of corporate innovation not dominated by the here and now, but not so far out into the future to be a destination we never reach (Hope for The Future - see pp. 28-29).

7

CHAPTER 1 - THE FUTURE BEYOND INNOVATION RIP Status Quo, Reframing Innovation,

Future Hope & Practical Help

CHAPTER 2 - GETTING STARTED The Pin Just Dropped, What Now?

CHAPTER 11- THE F:N VAULT : RESOURCES In case of change, innovation++, growth,

transformation or future disruption, break Futureproofing : Next glass

CHAPTER 12- MONDAY MORNING IN THE FUTURE Futureproofing has No Finish Line — Better,, Bigger,

Bolder & Simpler Futures Best Practices & Opportunities Ahead!

CONTENTSBegin well and finish well … as we get you motivated and started for the change opportunities & innovation barriers ahead in chapter 1 & 2, we also get you readied and further involved for applying our book’s key architecture, canvases and steps for the inevitable future challenges in chapter 11 & 12.

2

30

224

236

THE F:N ENGINE ROOMCHAPTER 3 : SEE — INSIDE NOW

A Candid Look in the Mirror, A North Star to Guide, Winds to Maneuver & A Compass to Steer

CHAPTER 4 : SEE — INTEGRATED FORCES Tapping the Customer Kaleidoscope, Cross-Industry

Periscope, Tech Gyroscope & Futures Telescope

CHAPTER 5 : LEARN — IMAGINE NEXT Find Your Innovation++ Game, Better Ideas, Triple-distilled

CHAPTER 6 : LEARN — INFORM NEXT Not Just Wishful Thinking but

Experiments & Rigor

CHAPTER 7 : DECIDE — INSPIRE Go Beyond Ideas, Products & Services to Business

Models, Ecosystems and Experiences

CHAPTER 8 : DECIDE — IMPACT Getting Real —Taking Innovation &

Change Out of its Test Tube

CHAPTER 9 : COMMIT — IMPLEMENT Commercialize, Scale & Actually Get To Next

CHAPTER 10 : COMMIT — IMMERSE Entrench Futureproofing & Innovation++ as an

Organization-Wide Habit, Culture & Skill

62

82

142

162

102122

188210

Go through our core chapters sequentially or dive in and fix a specific problem. Each of our stepped chapters has pragmatic canvases, tools, activities, perspectives, landscapes profiles and research that brings the futureproofer’s environment vivid and up-close.

9

THE FIVE SINS OF CORPORATE INNOVATION For more than 15 years, we’ve worked with large companies and tracked the results to land on a unified approach for integrating the future while still running a company for today. Our F:N approach is designed to address five currently huge gaps in how corporations and scaleups change, grow & innovate:

INNOVATION’S FAILING GRADE

INNOVATION MYOPIA

SPEED & SCALE PROCESS

GAP

ASPIRATION VS.

REALITY

LEADERSHIP & CULTURAL

DISSONANCE

18th out of 23

Innovation Credibility — Performance

Ranking Among

Corporate Functions

(as perceived by boards & execs)

< 2/12 54%Average

Company Mastery on Core

Innovation Intelligences & Competencies

Execs Who Believe

Getting New Ideas

to Market Quickly &

Scale-ably is their

#1 Innovation Problem

85% vs. 10%

C-Suite Concerned

about Business Model

Disruption/ Execs who

have made it their #1

Innovation Priority

75% vs. 37%

Leaders who Believe

they have

a Culture of Innovation/

Employees who Agree

Source: HBR, Wikibrands, PwC, Criticaleye, Oliver Wyman,

D-

Satisfy your left brain with our top 110 freshest stats & evidence on change, innovation and the future:

futureproofingnext.com/fn110changestats

http://futureproofingnext.com/fn110changestats

Our mission is quite different. We believe the innovation industry is asking the wrong questions about how companies succeed in a fast-moving marketplace.

We don’t need more ideas. We don’t need more wishful thinking. And we certainly don’t need any more elegant explanations about how chaotic our world has become. We get it.

To be truly helpful & hopeful, we needed to deliver a practical recipe book on how the best companies deliver change, transformation & growth, not because we want it to be, but because we’ve seen the early signals for what really works.

With Futureproofing ; Next, we aim to be the go-to resource that curates the best foresights and practices. We have managed to fuse a number of practitioner worlds that don’t talk to each other very well and blend them into a core approach.

Too many books on change & innovation are tribalized — biased by their tech-driven, talent-oriented, innovation-school, customer-led, futurism-based or strategy-adhering pedigrees. Enough we say, We have managed to bridge these isolated islands of effective practice into a “change Pangaea” with supporting activities that bring it all together.

We were driven by the need and started the exercise of pulling together Futureproofing : Next with three overriding seed questions: • Why is today’s larger company innovation &

change falling short? • How can companies move more quickly into new

areas and tap into real corporate advantages?

• How can companies avoid being blinded by emerging competition and stay ahead of untapped customer potential?

Futureproofing : NextTM is a new point of departure. It’s designed to address the shortcomings of traditional change models. We have come to recognize the need for a fundamentally new innovation-led growth practice that reflects what companies really need. Today, we don’t have time for the kinds of five-year planning exercises we’ve used in the past. Today, we need to galvanize the best of strategy, innovation, emergent science/research, customer insights and future sensors into one approach. Today, we need futureproofing.

“There are shining examples today of companies like AXA that have figured out how to effectively incubate the radiance from the edge while they keep the strength of the core.”

Mark Zawacki, 650 Labs

DEPARTURE DIFFERENCES: A DIFFERENT MINDSET — Pragmatically optimistic, Future-based. and Practitioner- Friendly.

A DIFFERENT CHANGE SPECTRUM — All twelve change functions - strategy, leadership, talent, culture, innovation, business models, technology, process, customers, brands, trends and foresight.

A DIFFERENT CHALLENGE — Leading, championing supporting and sustaining change inside companies from 100-5,000,000 employees.

F:N A New Point of

Departure

11

The Change World Has Changed

A Changemakers'’ New Lexicon

A #Next30 Curation


A Practitioner’s Mindset

THE FUTURE BEYOND INNOVATION

THE WORLD DOESN’T NEED ANOTHER INNOVATION BOOK

… BUT IT DOES NEED A PLAYBOOK TO GROW, SUCCEED AND WIN.

See what 99 books made it onto our Changemakers' Bookshelf:

futureproofingnext.com/fn99bookshelf

http://futureproofingnext.com/fn99bookshelf

Companies need to get out of small boxes & into INNOVATION++, FUTUREPROOFING & NEXTING.

The aperture that many leaders see their innovation agenda through is so frustratingly narrow. Winning organizations are not just creating new stuff, they are configuring entirely new experiences, business models & ecosystems of value. And they are doing it everyday, not just on launch week.

Traditional launch and change-siloed thinking is so inadequate we had to create new vernacular for what we were witnessing and describing: • R&D needs to become a much wider Innovation++ • Innovation needs to become a more thorough

Futureproofing • Launch mode of new products & services needs

to become a continuous state of Nexting

To succeed, change has to break out of the boxes it has put itself in. To overcome the insufficiency of legacy thinking and the baggage of traditional conventions, we need to craft a new changemakers’ dictionary to bring about a different future.

A FUTURE GLOSSARY & SPARK GALLERY : FN132 Futureproofing Lexicon — explore our 132+ key terms, amplifying existing less well-known words, and creating new language to describe a future beyond innovation;: futureproofingnext.com/lexicon

FN44 Futureproofing Quotes — ponder 44 of our own quotes and 44 other thought leaders’ quotes that illuminate the realities about the future of change: futureproofingnext.com/quotes

13

The Change World Has Changed

A Changemakers’

New Lexicon A #Next30 Curation



Not Just Another Book

FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT WHY NOW - THE IMPACT OF 6 KEY CHANGESPACE & AGILITY

OF THE MARKETPLACERAPID TECHNOLOGY

ADVANCEMENTUNRELENTING

CUSTOMER NEED

CULTURAL EXPECTATION

CROSS-INDUSTRY BARRIERS ERODING

SOCIETAL NEEDS & TOP CHALLENGES

The marketplace is operating 4X faster

than it was a generation ago.

Time needed to download a 3.5GB film:

2000 — 1 day 2010 — 50 minutes

2020 — 3.6 seconds.

64% of customers currently reward/consider rewarding

companies on socially responsible behaviour (up

from 46% in 2000).

Execs who believe environmental/social/governance programs drive

value: Long term: 94% (vs. 84% in 2009) Short term 65% (vs. 47% in 2009).

Customer expectations have increased 28% year over year, but company delivery has only gone

up 6%.

55% of execs now believe their top competitive threat

over the next 5 years is outside their current

industry.

Sources: F:N Hockeystick Index, Consumer Technology Association, Brand Keys, McKinsey, F:N The Corporate Innovation Playbook, Globescan

Explore our change basket of factors further: futureproofingnext.com/hockeysticks

http://futureproofingnext.com/hockeysticks

The Change World

Has Changed

Across a basket of factors, the world is over 4X faster than it was a generation ago. We were praising A.I. just two decades ago for winning at chess and checkers; now it is driving our cars, diagnosing patient conditions better than physicians & taking the most routinized jobs off human hands completely.

Business is 3X more precarious. Humans, are 825X more connected than we were in the early 2000s. Trains are 7.7X faster. The costs of DNA sequencing, efficiency of solar power and pricing of a drone - all are exponentially down. Citius. Altius, Fortius. Quae potest in futuro.

In a world that has become so unpredictable, volatile and fast, the way we deploy our resources, invent our “next” and apply our technologies must certainly change too.

This shouldn’t be shocking nor seen as accusatory to any of the formative thinking that came before us. People should stop digging their heels in, spending all their energy protecting the past versus embracing the future that’s on a much different trajectory.

Whereas previous change approaches and tools were driven by: military optimization, mass production, international competition or Silicon Valley startup frenzy, the apparatus for change in the 2020s needs to respond to the six key new tailwinds and headwinds adjoining this page..

Welcome to a world where change is a constant. The electric lightbulb did not come from the continuous improvement of candles. Innovation

and transformation will not come in predictable steps either. Get ready for jagged big leaps. Enjoy the journey, because the future has no finish line.

“There’s an ongoing argument about whether corporations can change fast enough to keep up with the pace of the opportunities around us. I say, yes, we can. But the dynamics required to instil that sense of urgency, inside of a 25+ year old company are not easy. That means we have to focus even harder on how to do it.”

Navin Kunde, Clorox

F:N SYNCING WITH NEW WINDS: • Pace & Agility of The Marketplace — our

process leads to +2-4X venture speed, our Commit step addresses fast scale & our Hockey Stick MonitorTM tracks 50+ market factors & pace.

• Rapid Technology Advancement — each one of our four steps addresses tech components, and our Emerging 30TM & Digital PeriscopeTM ranks and tracks future digital advancement.

• Unrelenting Customer Need — our See & Learn steps peer into expected customer futures via foresight & prosumers, and our Customer ZeitgeistTM analyzes future needs & values.

• Cultural Expectation — our Commit step addresses the gap between edge and core, and our Future of Work 2020++TM investigates the workplace of the future,

• Cross-Industry Barriers Eroding — our Decide step expands the circle enhancing initiative ambitions and our MetatrendsTM & Post-Pandemic Industry 25TM understand influences across industry verticals.

15

A #Next30 Curation




Futureproofing, Not Predicting

A #NEXT30 CURATION We have extracted the best of 30 schools of innovation

& change and put them under one umbrella.

For a full breakdown of our Innovation++ Next30 visit : futureproofingnext/Next30innovation

Futureproofing: Next is not a completely foreign argument to the world, We are a mashup of tools and ideas from thirty facets of change and a variety of strategy, leadership & innovation schools like agile, lean, business models, design thinking, backcasting and foresight planning. Synthesizing and shaping the best features of these leading theories and schools is a core F:N strength.

Using popular corporate strategy tools like SWOT and Five Forces, leaders experience a surface level understanding of what’s really going on and ignore the clarion call of the future. Given the process and typical audiences involved in these exercises, the first directional steps of innovation imbues a considerable anchoring bias rooted in the past and not engineered to address the burning questions of the what’s next.

Many innovation schools, although they purport to build a broad range of interesting change outputs on the planning table, get shaped to only help support minor incremental improvements in reality. Game-changing ventures and business model pivoting initiatives with strong market impact simply don’t get produced from these approaches. Part of the issue is design, part of the issue is application. Other strident beliefs around the unlimited potential of progress and future technology potential, including futurist approaches, trend extrapolations, time horizon models or faith in an exponential singularity, lack a level of specificity and a near term rigor to be used practically by

corporate innovators. Overwhelmed by the possibilities, we feel the pull of the status quo almost like the undertow of the ocean — leading to postponement of action.

Futureproofing : Next (F :N) is reframing the innovation game to a much bigger, action-focused playing field. Corporate success demands it.

Innovation done successfully is so not a specialist game anymore. Perhaps it never was. In fact, we needed a new word for “innovation”, given all its baggage and blindspots. At F:N, we’re now calling this expansive world of accelerated change & growth “innovation++“.

INNOVATION++ THIRTY ELEMENTS: The visual on the previous page displays the thirty (30) holistic parts of the future-savvy innovators’ universe including all their key facets, broken down into six (6) categories:

• The Whats — Applied Innovation & Development (grey-shaded)

• The Insides — Talent, Culture & Leadership Change (green)

• The Breakthroughs — Business Model & Ecosystem Development (teal)

• The Nexts — Futuremapping, Trends and Emerging Tech (purple)

• The Hows — Business Transformation & Innovation Management (black)

• The Outsides — Deep Marketplace Insight, Customers & Growth Engineering (red)

17

A #Next30 Curation Corporate Innovation

is the Major Leagues A Practitioner’s

MindsetNot Just

Another BookCustom-made for the 2020s


THE MAJOR LEAGUES OF INNOVATION++

Startups are shiny, but corporate change is the litmus test for innovation with impact, with many more & different considerations than entrepreneurial leadership.

Portfolio-wide perspective, short & long term views, alignment of organization,

partners, channels & supply chain.

A host of different value drivers and strategic/tactical considerations.

Narrow focus — build a solution, get market fit and find customers, often a

very short term view.

Driving valuation & cash flow are often the dominant #1 and #2 motivations.

Adaptive, strategic & collaborative, many projects, balancing planning w/ experiments and edge w/ know-how.

Influencing 100s of partners, 1,000s of employees and millions of customers.

Energetic risk taking, full dedication & single venture focus, “make it up as you

go” planning.

Influencing a few investors, tens of employees & hundreds of customers.

Breakthrough, but needs to account for reputational risks, contingencies &

resource efficiencies.

Quick and first-to-scale, but not at all costs.

Maximum flexibility in decision-making and if failing — pivot.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, “we only have x months of capital”.

Wide set of inside and outside stakeholders, often global in reach.

Potentially limitless impact, can deal with big societal and $B challenges.

Narrow set of stakeholders, biggest are funders and very first customers.

Impact usually limited by funding and narrowness of market coverage.

Decision- Making

& Options

Mindset & Pace

Leadership & Influence

Target & Potential Impact

CORPORATE INNOVATION STARTUP INNOVATION

Join our forum to debate the unfair advantages, defining features and challenges of corporate vs, startup innovation: futureproofingnext.com/corporateinnovationmajorleagues

http://futureproofingnext.com/corporateinnovationmajorleagues

As much as we can help startups, we really are a book for corporate innovators, scaleups and edge venture groups that live inside, or with them.

Bigger can be beautiful again, and it won't be from simply imitating startups. Discover how we can get corporate growth into a higher gear & create bigger impact for good in the world. It may cut across the grain of vaunting our favourite startup founder iconoclasts but corporate change in the 2020s is the toughest benchmark for innovation leadership.

Stewardship of corporate growth needs to factor in much different levels of decision scope, more sophisticated leadership acumen, a more finessed mindset & pace and potentially larger financial, societal and planetary impact than your average, or even superhuman, garage entrepreneur..

As much as we glamorize and praise the men & women who lead startups, the most underrated, change agent role is really in pivoting and growing established organizations. These leaders of Incs., Cos. Orgs. and Govs. can certainly learn from the entrepreneurial approach to speed, risk ,flexibility and resource constraints. Asking them to merely imitate their startup cousins’ is a complete disservice to their challenges.

What’s the magnitude of difference between the two? With corporate change, the challenges are taller, the sweat equity involved larger, the tradeoffs & risk assessments more sophisticated, the potential economic & societal impact greater and the forces to manage wider. With F:N, we genuinely celebrate these brilliant and tireless intrapreneurial champions.

Approaching corporate growth based on start-up style innovation, at a team level or through acquisitions, hasn’t consistently led to successful scaling. Organizations-at-scale experience many bumps in the road on the path of early stage initiatives to full integration into a corporate portfolio. We believe these big companies can thrive in the 2020s, they just can’t do it with the mindset and tools they’ve been using.

WHAT OUR KEY AUDIENCES WILL GET: Corporate Innovation Leadership & the C-Suite -championing more ambitious mindsets, amplifying a bolder change agenda, strengthening future leadership skills and removing common barriers.

Change & Innovation Teams and Project Groups - building broader change perspectives , acquiring approaches to actually get ventures to next and providing in-market blueprints to advance efforts.

Change Agents, Intrapreneurs and Transformationists - elevating competencies, providing assets to lead end-to-end efforts and boosting confidence that they aren’t alone.

Stakeholders & Supporters - building empathy on why company change is so difficult, increasing fluency on the best performers & practices and acquiring knowledge on the true change levers.

Other interested groups: • Edge organizations and corporate ventures • Scaleups & transitioning entrepreneurs • Planners, policy makers & strategists • Educators, students and curiosity seekers about

change & the future

19

Corporate Innovation is the

Major Leagues A Practitioner’s Mindset


Custom-made for the 2020s


Pandemic New Paths

THE CHANGE WORLD HAS CHANGED “The half-life of a career, of a company and of an industry industry is so much shorter even a decade ago, Staying ahead and reflecting these tectonic business shifts might be leadership’s key challenge over the next decade.

INNOVATION YOU CAN TAKE TO THE BANK : A PRACTITIONER’S MINDSET

“In conceiving Futureproofing : Next, we ran across many works of literature that gave an interesting academic viewpoint, a diagnostic understanding or a provocative argument; very few provided an end-to-end guidance system on what to actually do.”

FUTUREPROOFED. BULLETPROOFED. CORPORATE-PROOFED.

A Practitioner’s

Mindset

Futureproofing : Next bridges the gap between the whiteboard and the trenches.

Some business books feel theoretical. You know there’s good research behind their ideas, but it’s hard to get to the heart of what you need to do inside your company today. Some books are great at explaining and storytelling the overt or hidden side of key things, but struggle to apply their theorems moving forward.

Futureproofing : Next takes the opposite approach. We’ve translated insights from a large community of 250+ companies, our own proprietary research, 99+ books and white papers, conversations and interviews representing virtually every industry and analysis of what’s ever worked.

We make it simple for a practitioner to get organized and succeed at commercializing new ideas, for now, three years from now and hopefully a decade from now.

We’ve written a practical guide—optimized for practitioners. The tools are synthesized hard-won lessons from change agents, innovators, P&L leaders and technology disruptors. The result is a road-tested process, designed to plug-and-play in a variety of industries and environments.

F:N’s Practical components: THE CORPORATE INNOVATION PLAYBOOK RANKINGS — Quantitative and qualitative foresights and research from our most recent intelligence study about how leaders innovate.

CHANGE ARCHITECTURE — Equipping leaders to SEE new opportunities with fresh perspective, LEARN skills required for tomorrow’s market, DECIDE where and how to place their bets and COMMIT to a new direction.

CANVASES — 17 different templates, roadmaps and worksheets, that help change leaders direct, align and generate their efforts, teams and leadership.

TOOLS — 36+ à la carte tools, four to get started and eight within each one of our core steps, that tackle key steps and ideate, codify, align and energize around the impasses change leaders oftentimes face.

CASE STUDIES & PROFILES — Wisdom & inspiration from business & thought leaders on how change gets done in real life.

EXERCISES — Interactive activities that help identify diverge, converge and discover breakthroughs.

LANDSCAPES — The top trends, the most disrupted industries, the most promising business models and plenty more, all visualized and brought to life.


Hope for the Future

21



Pandemic New Paths

FUTUREPROOFING: NEXT NOT JUST ANOTHER BOOK“We’ll be honest, we don’t like many business books. They are anachronisms in a digital age: too one-way, too prosy, too preachy, too sequential and outdated fast.

Futureproofing: Next goes off the page to provide an ongoing set of content & resources as a lifeline to change agents. Join our tribe of future-curious and change-committed.”

EXPANSION. COLLABORATION. CONNECTION.

Getting Started

F:N - Not Just

Another Book

Not a Book “Book” — with Futureproofing : Next (F:N), we set out to create a different type of book format ; a practical guide, not limited to the pages it is written on, and designed for change agents, executives, leaders, futurists and experts in real life.

The Book Itself — is intended to help trailblazers plan, guide and align their innovation & transformation efforts :for a barely recognizable marketplace, culture & society of tomorrow:

• design-friendly — a colourful array of tools, templates, callouts, exercises & canvases

• fresh — original content & information intended to be republished every year to stay current

• form factor — a hand-holdable book that deserves to be on bookshelves but small enough to bring to meetings/travel with

• gestalt & simplicity — showing a bit of the chaotic universe, and a lot of the let’s focus on what’s important

• expanded & collaborative web experience — providing a wealth of extended options and forums to go deeper on any of our book content online

• gravitas — substantive cues as a corporate-ready book, not a comic book or puff piece

What’s Not In The Book — in the same spirit of collaboration and collective input that created this book, we wanted to continue Futureproofing ;:Next, not as a static book creation, but as a continuing multi-faceted movement. We are creating a compendium of resources that live online & extend the content you are digesting in these pages.

Forums for Ongoing Participation — Don’t be the lone wolf. Communities, guilds and groups always produce better answers. lJoin ours, and add to the discussion and creation by connecting, contributing and participating in 20+ different areas.

EXTRA RESOURCES BY THE NUMBERS: - FN11 — Research-based Rankings & Lists - FN22 — Future-Readiness Factors & Audit - F:N33 — Change Headlines - FN44 — Hall of Game Quotes - FN55 — Tools & Canvases (supported online) - FN66 — Global Guild of Champions - FN77 — Future-ready Companies - FN88 — Triggers for Futureproofing Enquiry - F:N99 — The Changemakers' Bookshelf - FN110 — Futureproofing Stats - FN121 — Futureproofing Landscapes/Tables - FN132 — Futureproofing Lexicon

Supporting Initiatives - Futureproofing Awards — recognizing the best - Foresight Ventures - learning more 3-4x annually - Twice-monthly, “Futureproofing Now” Webcast/

Podcast - covering off relevant topics - In the Author’s Studio - interviewing other

change-relevant authors - FN Training Curriculum - building practical skills - Futureproofing : Next Sprints & Workshops -

helping clients break down barriers - A Future-Readiness Audit - evaluating Inc. health - An Interactive Activity card series - fun additions Discover it all at : futureproofingnext.com/thebook

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Pandemic New Paths

http://futureproofingnext.com/thebook

FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT CHANGE BENEFITS FROM A-TO-Y

Getting Started

See, Learn, Decide, Commit

Futureproofing, Not

Predicting

Predicting the future is a fool’s game. It’s the same reason why casinos always make money in the long run, pollsters are often wrong in predicting elections & futurists rarely check their accuracy 12 months later>

The world is exponentially VUCA*. it has been for awhile. The environment that innovation operates in has accelerated past our ability to command-and-control plan for it.

We’ll candidly admit that using the term “futureproofing” in our title has a double entendre that may lead potential advocates astray, We are not innovation Nostradami. We are not corporate soothsayers. Instead, what we really embrace is taking stock and ownership of our futures. We are not prisoners to a pre-determined fate and for that matter, a straight line projection of our histories,

One of the biggest factors of futureproofing is getting a thorough outside-in understanding of what is happening around us now. It also means “sensemaking” some of the early signals that spell much different future scenarios for our businesses.

If you look at the key modules of our work in this book from chapters 3-to-10, futureproofing drops our “proofing” bread crumbs throughout: • INSIDE NOW — Rooting companies in their

constancy of purpose despite the challenges and evaluating their state of future-readiness.

• INTEGRATED FORCES — Having a continuous understanding of the six intelligences (we call them scopes) that will buffet your organization.

• IMAGINE NEXT — Hosting rapid sprints that cycle through your best percolating ideas with energy.

• INFORM NEXT — Continuously fielding a range of promising experiments with a span of impacts.

• INSPIRATION — Asking and co-creating with, not the average stakeholder or customer, but special individuals that have seen, or are working on the future, and can backcast to what to do now.

• IMPACT —Serving up a change portfolio that operates across all planes & levels of change.

• IMPLEMENT — Scaling ventures and integrating edge organizations and technologies into the mainstream of an organization expeditiously.

• IMMERSE — Building a culture that is hewn for organization-wide changes and pivots, and not serving up silo-ism and NIMBY-ism.

• IMMERSE — Attracting an omniscient & standing guild and bank of foresights around your company.

Markets are being disrupted every day by mercurial customer values and outside-of-industry threats. Even in the span of planning & writing this book, we have seen the effects of a generation-defining pandemic, accelerated AI and an altered future of work. Interestingly, we actually asked a question in our MetatrendsTM study in 2019 “what socio-economic, cross-industry force could affect your next three years?” Respondents actually did rank a global health pandemic as one of the top 25 influences. Unfortunately for planners, vaccine developers and travel companies, they ranked it only 16th!

We need an approach that doesn't predict the future but proofs against it. Certainty, stable progress, go-it-alone, kaizen** and extrapolating the past, have been replaced by probability, speed, co-creation, bold ventures and scenario planning the future. Let’s go.

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Pandemic New Paths

* VUCA - an acronym first used by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus in 1987 and now popularized to describe environments that were volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous ** Kaizen - Japanese word meaning “change for the better” and most associated with continuous improvement practices of Toyota

METATRENDS FOR THE 2020s

Grey & Black Swan Moments

e.g.Pandemic

Faster Customer Behaviour & Value Shifts

Accelerated Tech Performance & Adoption

Disruptive Marketplace Threats from Outside

RESPONSIVE, QUICKER, CONTINUOUS, PERPETUAL

FUTUREPROOFING

Polarization of Wealth, Income and

Views

Erosion of Trust/ Pushes for

Transparency

Flexible Work, Career & Lifestyles

Societal Third Pillars & Values, Younger

Generation Beliefs

Visual Credit:: The Sustainability Compass - Centre for System Solutions

What seemed improbable now has become likely. Consider these major eight socio-macroeconomic, cultural, cross-industry & technological forces that should define our next decade and principally shape our futures, Deny it if you want, but our environment shapes us. We’ll need a systemic approach to innovation that accommodates such globally sweeping and profound change.

For a fresh update on all 25 Metatrends, click: futureproofingnext/Metatrends

Getting Started



At the time of this writing, the 2020s have already seen a lot of pandemic, political, environmental, class and race-driven change & activism. Expect more. These macro decade-long forces we call “metatrends”. Some predate this decade and continue unabated; some are now seen more evidently; and some have manifested overnight.

Here’s our brief explanation of how we see this decade unfolding with evidence and why a responsive, quicker, continuous & perpetual Futureproofing : Next approach is tailored for it.

Grey & Black Swan Moments* — Evidence: A confluence of globalization, digitalization, connectedness, climate events and financial crises. F:N beliefs: We embrace the fluid world post-pandemic for potential future scenarios and plausibilities. We have a SEE step that mines six intelligences to scan wide and gaze far, and overall process that emphasizes adaptability, agility, data, experimentation and learning. Informed by: Making Sense of a Pandemic & Trends 200TM.

Faster Customer, Behaviour & Value Shifts — Evidence: Forty percent of the most globally innovative brands in 2020 are new to the list vs. the previous year. F:N beliefs: We incorporate deep prosumer inputs, insights and observations across our four steps with 9 specific tools focused on incorporating customer & stakeholder inputs Informed by: Customer ZeitgeistTM & The Buzz ReportTM.

Accelerated Tech Performance & Adoption — Evidence: 5G speeds are 18 times faster than 4G/ Zoom went from 10M ro 300M daily users in four months,. F:N beliefs: We guide our process with a deep dive on our annually updated top 30 ranked emerging technologies and their leading applications, using 6 specific tools focused on tech exploration and grounding. Informed by: The Digital PeriscopeTM, AI & Innovation++TM, Blockchain BenchmarkTM & The Emerging 30TM.

Disruptive Marketplace Threats from Outside — Evidence: 40% of the top ten companies in an industry will be displaced by digital disruption over the next five years. F:N beliefs: Peering cross-industry for inspiration, evidence, cooperation & ventures is a defining trait of ours, with four tools dedicated to opening the corporate aperture wide. Informed by: COVID Industry 25TM & 52 Business ModelsTM.

Polarization of Wealth, Income & Views — Evidence: Pre-pandemic, the #1 ranked metatrend force, F:N beliefs: F:N considers the global state and scrutinizes through data and intuitive leaps real truths and future realities, not based on hope but rational optimism. Informed by: MetatrendsTM & Grey Swan Guild.

Erosion of Trust and Pushes for Transparency — Evidence: 76% of us worry about false info/fake news being used as a weapon; only 38% believe business is honest. F:N beliefs: Our approach gets at unconscious biases that blur truths inside companies and fields open tactics to engage stakeholders transparently outside the firm. Informed by: Cybersecurity/Trust 2020++TM & AI-EthicsTM.

Flexible Work, Career and Styles — Evidence: 40% of the U.S. are freelancers, (up 16 pts. vs. 2005) and accelerating given work-from-anywhere ethos. F:N beliefs: Talent is everywhere,. F:N embraces the on-demand approach to bringing the best talent to bear on a challenge and suggests in each process step expert & crowd-based iterations with outside partners and staff. Informed by: Future of Work 2020++TM & FN LeadershipTM.

Societal 3rd Pillars/Gen Y & Z Values Take Over — Evidence: 94% believe companies should act with purpose, only 37% believe they do ; this view is embraced 46% more by Gen Z and millennials as a purchase-driving attitude. F:N beliefs: Staring front & centre in our process is our North Star purpose tool; we believe in the primacy of a meaningful purpose and narrative, despite changing environments. Informed by: MetatrendsTM, Futureproofing - SkillsTM & Post-Pandemic LeadershipTM.

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Futureproofing Canvas

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Pandemic New Paths

Sources: :Grey Swan Guild, Brand Keys, Open Signal, Zoom, Cisco, F:N Metatrends, Edelman Trust Barometer, Freelancers Union, Zeno Group

* Grey Swans - events unlikely, but forecastable with large consequences, Black Swans - evens unthinkable, unplannable with severe consequences

THE PANDEMIC THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

The majority of sensemakers we surveyed suggested that this pandemic will define the next decade if not generation, here’s how they frame its significance:

Generational Effects — similar to economic collapse/world war

Decade-long Effects — defining the 2020s

31% 26%

Months into the pandemic, how are you evaluating the importance of its impact?

3-5 Year Effects — multiple business and policy cycles

Less Than a Year Effects — impact confined to 2021 year-end

29%

15%

#2 The Global Economy

#3 Culture & Societal Norms

#1 The Workplace & Employment

19%

52%

20%22%#4 The Marketplace & Shopping

#5 Education & Learning#6 Health & Safety#7 Trade & Supply Chains 15%

40%30%

What will end up changing the most over the long term, after we recover from the

wake of this pandemic (top 2 choices):

Source:”Making Sense of a Pandemic, Grey Swan Guild 7/20

Getting Started


Pandemic New

Paths

We originally wrote Futureproofing : Next as a new perspective for business leaders to get ahead of an uncertain future. We’d spent years working with corporate teams to debunk myths and streamline a system to bring new initiatives to commercial scale. We began with a refreshing premise: that the best companies stop placing the future on a time horizon that never arrives.

And then, in 2020, just as we were putting the finishing touches on the book Futureproofing : Next —COVID-19 arrived—marking the beginning of what's become a "new future". This moment has also underscored the urgency for teams to equip themselves with the sensemaking, resilience and commitment built into Futureproofing. To be honest, in March’20 we took our own advice, paused the publication plans for the book, and instead applied our futureproofing principles—See, Learn, Decide, and Commit—to the business challenges and societal changes shaping our world. We wanted to be sure that our ideas would withstand the test of dramatic change.

To apply the See step, we watched the rapid acceleration of game-changing impact on lives and livelihoods and broadened our perspectives on health and safety, the future of work and talent, technologies, sustainability, global ecosystem relationships, and innovative business models.

We sought to Learn together with others to make sense of the pandemic and provide guidance to leaders as we emerged on the other side. To help

us think through the implications, we formed a global community of leaders & sensemakers to help us think through the implications of this world-changing force— the Grey Swan Guild.

Finally to help us Decide which business strategies made sense for our clients, we engaged in a series of sessions, discussions, webcasts, and projects all designed to pressure test our principles under conditions of economic stress and extreme uncertainty.

The insights we gleaned from pressure testing our methods with a diverse mix of clients, teams, and individuals led us to a renewed sense of clarity on what it takes to truly Commit to a bolder future in the wake of the COVID-19’s impact.

As we returned to our publication path, we are deeply aware that the COVID-19 era has placed Futureproofing : Next—The Future Beyond Innovation, into a context of greater urgency, purpose and relevance.

Now, more than ever, we need to master resilience, spark our imaginations to take a bolder look at what’s possible, and have systems in place to be alert to the change around us. All of this needs to push past our response and recovery instincts and build our capacity to bravely and boldly lead our teams in new directions.

We have become our own clients over the last six months and truly know that F:N can function as the compass for post-pandemic leadership.

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Five Levels of innovation

27

THE FUTURE CAN BE FRIENDLY IF YOU NEED CHANGE, GROWTH OR INNOVATION…

GET STARTED

Can Your Company

Grow Bigger?

Can Your Company Change Faster?

Can Your Company

Act Simpler?

Can Your Company

Aspire to Be Bolder?

NO

NO NO

NO

YES

Only 27% of CEOs are assured

of their future revenue growth

prospects,the lowest confidence since

2009.

Change ventures & initiatives need to punch harder.

Innovative companies are operating 110% faster

than they did 5 years ago.

Corporations need to change at startup speed and become more agile.

Business model and transformative

innovation++ generate 4.5X the value of

traditional product-based innovation.

Companies need to look at configuring growth ventures vs. launching incremental innovation.

80% of companies have a problem scaling innovation talent, resources, funding, alignment and ability

to scale are biggest challenges.

Firms need to adopt an end-to-end change process flexible to

mesh w/ needs & culture

Source: PwC, Futureproofing : Next, Accenture, Doblin

FUTUREPROOFING : NEXT PURPOSE & HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

YES

YES

YES

Getting Started



Hope for

The Future

Catch Up, Not Give Up. We truly think companies can catch up, not just give up to the forces of inertia and fate. As an agent of change and steward of large companies, these are unprecedented times to be a leader and alive.

With the right amount of inspiration, perspiration, insight and boldness, corporate innovators do not have to take a back seat to the startup unicorns or the incumbent faves. Shackletons unite!

The average established company can be disrupted in as little as 3.1 years by a new threat*. The barriers to scale have come down dramatically. But that formula also works in reverse. Large, financed companies have unprecedented advantages to imagine new businesses and expand them quickly. Why face the perils of disruption versus being the disruptor yourself?

Futureproofing : NextTM can help bridge aspiration with reality. We believe every organization, team and person can become what they want to be with the right approach to opportunity. We believe the future can be a friendly place, but it does start by adopting a different future mindset today.

Similar to getting fit in our personal lives, we know we need to alter behaviors that are damaging and self-defeating. We need to get smarter and put in the work, We need to get rid of bad habits and stop hanging around partners & people that reinforce our limited ambitions & acceptance of okay.

Futureproofing : Next does not have a preferred industry vertical. It’s designed for any aspiring company to integrate their futures into today:

• a traditional auto company knows they need to move into a world of mobility with haste

• a global bank recognizes that their business model is at risk and has to explore options

• a leading manufacturing firm knows that data and IoT sensors are the key to their future

• A well-loved food brand needs to migrate to a more sustainable footprint

• A Latin American real estate leader wonders how to enter the Asian market

• A European hospitality company faces pricing pressures and needs a different value proposition

• A clothing company believes machine learning can be their path to loyalty

• A software company wonders how it might serve a different customer segment

Companies are searching for their future, we want to help them find it.

“When we take responsibility for the market impact we know we could have, we have agency over the future. We owe it to the people we serve and the

people we work with to commit to a ‘why’ and hold ourselves accountable to reach or exceed that

standard.” Ennis Olson, Google

LET’s GET STARTED: In chapter 2 “Getting Started”, we will profile: • the ten different paths to getting started • our “See, Learn, Decide, Commit” canvas unveiled • an expanded view — the five levels of innovation • the sixteen Change Inc. archetypes • our Team Charter canvas and four supporting tools

Five Levels of innovation

Change Inc. Archetypes

29* Source: Digital Vortex/Fujitsu

cover - next

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